June 2007

  • Bliss!

    A difficult day, so sheer joy to head off to sea for the first time this year in the old and battered boat. The Yamaha outboard started on the third pull, and then it was off into an absolutely stunning, calm evening. Martha perched in the bow, we headed off on the flood tide and,…

  • Prince’s ‘Guitar’ , ‘Batdance’, my guitar and writing about whisky

    Played the new single ‘Guitar’ again today, and it’s a thrilling piece of post-Jehovah’s Witnessing Princepop. Perhaps, as Brian texted in to say, not up to the standard of Batdance (check out that EXTRAORDINARY video on YouTube here) but still jammed with all that inimitable sly humour, stunning rhythm guitar, ripsnorting lead, supressed filth and…

  • The joy (and strangeness)of Shetland foy(s)

    Back to Lerwick on Saturday, and the Johnsmas Foy continuing to pull in the punters. Here we have a scene more familiar from Up Helly Aa, with a couple of guisers, dressed up as…who knows? From what I overheard, they weren’t sure either.And then north, north and north again, to the glory that is Fethaland,…

  • Mark Laurenson Band at The Longest Day

    …and they were great!

  • End of the Longest Day, and the tragedy that blighted it

    Well, it’s midnight plus 30, and that’s just about the end of my longest ever day’s broadcasting…six programmes (albeit only a few minutes in four of them, longer in Archie Fisher’s Travelling Folk and of course the full two hours of the TM Show itself. A wee Laphroaig and the wondrous surprise of finding Jean…

  • The Longest Day

    Midsummer, and BBC Radio Scotland is in Shetland, which will of course have more daylight than anywhere else in the UK, in strength: I’ve just had the excellent New Tradition (featuring a Morton daughter, he said proudly) in the Radiocroft, broadcasting live on the Fred Macaulay Show. Before that I was on Good Morning Scotland,…

  • Lulu gets really upset at being Dysoned…

    Lulu is moulting severely, as she does all too regularly. The process of being vacuumed using the Dyson’s car cleaning attachment is something she, amazingly, loves…

  • Foster’s fourth time lucky tomorrow?

    Foster Evans, our current Lost in Music champ on the show, has won three days in a row and is now poised to win a personal DVD player tomorrow, if no-one stops him. He’s on holiday at North Berwick and it’s been interesting getting his daily updates on what the family have been up to…

  • The one with the traffic policeman…

    Always a risky moment when you ask competition entrants, live on air, what it is they’re doing, or what they do for a living. DIY is a favourite, then there’s driving, either for pleasure or business, working at home (computers) working at the office (computers and earphones)a surprising number of farmers on tractors, people on…

  • Hoovering with a pint of Chardonnay

    …or so one entrant to today’s Lost in Music competition claimed. Certainly turned my mind to thoughts of a nice Malbec, seeing as the Warehouse Wine Club (free delivery to Shetland)recently left 12 bottles of red at the door. Some great tracks on the show today…album of the week is the new Stax compilation Sweet…